Two Sisters (On the Terrace)
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 to 1919) · 1881
A young woman in a deep blue dress and a red flannel hat sits on a terrace above the Seine, and a small girl in a white dress with a flowered bonnet leans against her, both of them looking out at us. A basket of balls of wool sits on the table beside them, and behind them the river, the trees and the far bank dissolve into a haze of spring green. Renoir painted it at Chatou, west of Paris, at the restaurant of the Maison Fournaise where he also painted the Luncheon of the Boating Party in the same year.
The two models were not sisters at all. The older girl was Jeanne Darlaud, a young actress, and the child is unknown; Renoir simply liked the pairing of blue and white against the spring landscape. Look at how differently he treats the parts of the picture. The faces are painted with smooth, careful strokes, almost like porcelain, while the background is a whirl of loose touches, and the balls of wool in the basket are pure dabs of red, blue and green that echo the flowers on the girl's hat. Renoir was at this moment starting to doubt Impressionism and to want firmer drawing, and you can see both tendencies at once.
The painting was bought straight from the artist by the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in 1881 and came to Chicago in 1933 through the bequest of Annie Swan Coburn, whose collection also gave the museum several of its Monets. It is one of the most popular paintings in the building, partly because of its sheer sunshine. A memorable detail is the tiny sailing boat on the river behind the child's shoulder, a reminder that this stretch of the Seine was the playground of Renoir's whole generation.
Did You Know? Renoir painted this in the same summer and at the same riverside restaurant as his Luncheon of the Boating Party, now in Washington.
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